The first vote of 2024 is now open

Until 12 February, it’s up to you to choose which play you’d like to be read on 27 March, the date of the next session of Read Theatre with Science. You can do so using this simple form.

 

We’ll announce the winning play after the votes have been counted and then we’ll start looking for volunteers for the Collaborative Translation Project. Those interested in joining this citizen science inspired endeavour can sign up via the following email: ler@marioneteatro.com

 

Below is a synopsis of each work, so you can get to know them better.

 

 

Luminescence Dating, de Carey Perloff

A thriller about a lost statue, a lost son, an ancient mystery and a love affair between two desperately mismatched people. Angela Hart has spent the better part of her career searching for a voluptuous naked Aphrodite sculpted by Praxitiles in the fourth century B.C. and lost to history. Her colleague and friend Victor Reid, a gay black anthropologist specializing in Queer Theory, steals a broken glazed arm from an excavation led by her professional nemesis, British archaeologist Nigel Edwards, and Angela begins to study it. As the ancient clay arm yields its secrets, these three highly competitive, emotionally charged academics begin to unravel the mystery of the missing statue, unleashing a whole set of desires that are orchestrated and stimulated by the Goddess of Love herself, an aging and world-weary Aphrodite disguised as the museum’s cleaning lady. Ultimately the statue is never found, but the heat generated by the search yields its own delicious rewards.

 

Trumpery, by Peter Parnell

It is 1858. Charles Darwin struggles to finish On the Origin of Species and give the world his theory of natural selection, while coping with family illness and his own impending loss of faith. Meanwhile, halfway around the world, Alfred Russel Wallace, a brilliant but virtually unknown explorer and Utopian socialist, has come up with the exact same theory. The one person he sends his abstract to is Charles Darwin. Can Darwin claim priority? And what will happen if he doesn’t finish his own book in time? Vibrantly comic and deeply moving, Trumpery examines what it means to live in a Darwinian universe from the points of view of the men who discovered the idea.

 

The Ruby Sunrise, by Rinne Groff

Hailed by The Boston Globe as “a gem,” The Ruby Sunrise begins when a 1920s tomboy feverishly works to develop her latest invention—a little something called “television.” Twenty-five years later, her daughter will stop at nothing to bring her mother’s incredible story to life during TV’s Golden Age. But will it get the truth it deserves?

“A finely tuned portrait of television’s early days. [Groff] has managed to skillfully blend past and present.” — Providence Journal

 

Rain Dance, by Lanford Wilson

In a ramshackle cantina in Los Alamos, New Mexico, on the night of 15 July 1945, four people await the test of the atomic bomb. Each of them is connected directly or indirectly with the top-secret Trinity project, and over the course of the evening the horror of what is about to be unleashed on the world begins to dawn on them. As tensions mount, and questions of science, religion and morality collide, “Rain Dance” makes palpable the thrilling and terrifying journey of our first steps into the atomic age.